Slack Export Viewer

A Slack Export archive viewer that allows you to easily view and share your Slack team's export (instead of having to dive into hundreds of JSON files).

Overview

slack-export-viewer is useful for small teams on a free Slack plan (limited to 10,000 messages) who overrun their budget and ocassionally need a nice interface to refer back to previous messages. You get a web interface to easily scroll through all channels in the export without having to look at individual JSON files per channel per day.

slack-export-viewer can be used locally on one machine for yourself to explore an export or it can be run on a headless server (as it is a Flask web app) if you also want to serve the content to the rest of your team.

Usage

1) Grab your Slack team's export

• Visit https://yourslackteam.slack.com/services/export (yourslackteam should obviously be replaced with your actual Slack team)
• Create an export
• Wait for it to complete
• Refresh the page and download the export (.zip file) into whatever directory

2) Point slack-export-viewer to it

Point slack-export-viewer to the .zip file and let it do its magic

slack-export-viewer -z /path/to/export/zip

If everything went well, your archive will have been extracted, processed, and browser window will have opened showing your #general channel from the export.

Installation

I recommend pipsi for a nice isolated install.

pipsi install slack-export-viewer

Or just feel free to use pip as you like.

pip install slack-export-viewer

slack-export-viewer will be installed as an entry-point; run from anywhere.

$ slack-export-viewer --help
Usage: slack-export-viewer [OPTIONS]

Options:
  -p, --port INTEGER  Host port to serve your content on
  -z, --archive PATH  Path to your Slack export archive (.zip file)
                      [required]
  -I, --ip TEXT       Host IP to serve your content on
  --no-browser        If you do not want a browser to open automatically, set
                      this.
  --debug
  --help              Show this message and exit.

Acknowledgements

Credit to Pieter Levels whose blog post and PHP script I used as a jumping off point for this.

Improvements over Pieter's script

slack-export-viewer is similar in core functionality but adds several things on top to make it nicer to use:

• An installable application
• Automated archive extraction and retention
• A Slack-like sidebar that lets you switch channels easily
• Much more "sophisticated" rendering of messages
• A Flask server which lets you serve the archive contents as opposed to a PHP script which does static file generation

Built With

• python